Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FMG)Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB)

Institute

Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR)Amsterdam School of Economics Research Institute (ASE-RI)

Abstract

We find in this thesis that careful specification of both observed and unobserved heterogeneity matters critically for emergent
temporal outcomes when there is sociodynamic feedback in the model, even when the feedback takes the simple form of an aggregate
field variable. Agent heterogeneity impacts the magnitude of the mode shares, the speed of the transition to the steady state
as well as very fundamentally the number of possible observable steady state solutions. Also the detailed effect of induced
heterogeneity is important to understand in different network structures, including the speed of information flow across them.
Misrepresentation of the appropriate scale at which social influence occurs and of the appropriate network structure can yield
strongly flawed policy implications when studying social feedback.

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